Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to social networking and, more specifically, to determining users' personality characteristics based on their communications in connection with the social networking system.
Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social networking system allows users to more efficiently communicate information that is relevant to their friends or other connections in the social network. Social networks typically incorporate a system for maintaining connections among users in the social network and links to content that are likely to be relevant to the users. Social networks also collect and maintain information about the users of the social network. This information may be static, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, interests, and a variety of other attributes, or it may be dynamic, such as tracking a user's actions within the social network. This information can then be used to target information delivery so that information more likely to be of particular interest to a user can be communicated to that user.
Typical social networking systems select content for a user based on information provided by the user and stored in a user profile and/or based on actions performed by the user and logged by the social networking system. Additional information about other users connected to the user may be used to further refine content selection. However, a user's personality also affects how the user interprets event or content and provides insights into how the user will react to new content or to context changes. Although user personality may be inferred based on user interactions with online communication channels, conventional social networking systems do not attempt to infer user personality characteristics from user interactions with the social networking systems.